If you haven't been keeping up with your data hygiene efforts, AOL is about to give you a good reason to get back on the wagon. The "Official AOL Postmaster Blog" has recently indicated that they are refining their filtering parameters to place a greater emphasis on the number of invalid recipients coming from a mailer. They haven't laid out the specifics, but they have said that if you have more invalids than others mailers that they deem similar to you, it will impact your delivery and also facilitate your removal from their whitelist.

AOL has always factored the number of invalid recipient's into a sender's reputation, but it sounds like their new process will weigh this factor more heavily in getting your email to the AOL inbox. If you’re a b-to-c mailer, you likely have a good number of AOL addresses that could be affected. However, even b-to-b mailers should take this as a wake-up call to ensure that their list hygiene practices are sound, and that bad addresses are regularly removed from all mailing lists.

At StrongMail, we highly recommend keeping your lists clean. We advise our own clients to keep their invalid recipients less then 5% of their total list, and we make it easy for them to do this with automated bounce processing and other handy tools in our email marketing solutions. In an era of sender accountability where reputation means more than content, you can't risk damaging the reputation you've worked so hard to establish. And remember that all the major ISPs look at the number of bad addresses you send to assess your reputation – not just AOL.

So, take a good long list at your lists, and make sure you have good processes in place to remove bad addresses. For more information on bounce management, including how hard and soft bounces should be treated differently, we encourage you to read our whitepaper, Get Smart About Bounce Management.

A recent survey conducted by Q Interactive and MarketingSherpa found that many users are using the "SPAM" button for a number of reasons. As far as the researchers are concerned, there is a lot of confusion by the end users as to what the purpose of the button really is. Within the press release, it is reported that the definition of SPAM has changed from Unsolicited to Unwanted.

To me, they are one in the same for the end users--when I talk to people every day that are not in the email industry, they see these as the same thing. Sure they might remember that they signed up for a newsletter, but if they no longer find it useful, to them it becomes SPAM. One time at a family gathering, everyone was trying to figure out exactly what I did. I asked the question--"what do you think SPAM is?" Almost everyone told me, it is the junk I got in my inbox that I don't want. So of course I dug deeper. What if you signed up for that junk, I asked. "Then they should make it worth my while, if it isn't, then it is SPAM," they replied. So by this definition hasn't SPAM always been email that people don't want, not just what they didn't ask for?